A few weeks ago I went on the rounds with the Collingwood soup van again – the first time in over a year and I loved every minute of it. Reconnecting with people, both the vannies and patrons alike, on the Smith street corner. I’d forgotten the positivity a night like that can bring, sharing a cup of coffee and catching up on everything in the cold with sausage rolls. I headed off to the commission housing estates afterwards to deliver more food around and check in. And that’s when I met Ally. One of the veteran van organisers had teed up an interview with her after he heard about our Modern Families project. He thought she was someone whose story needed to be heard.

There are a lot of people doing it tough and trying to raise their families on low incomes and with very little support. What is truly amazing however are the circumstances that brought each family to that point, and the way they manage with what they have. Ally’s family is just one of these. And she is the incredible matriarch that keeps them going, because as she says: “it doesn’t matter where you live, as long as you’re all together.”

Ally raised two sets of twin boys, identical and fraternal, almost single-handedly in a lovely home whilst holding down two jobs. She was young when she had her first set of twins, only 18. And later on, after being a single mum for four years, she married and decided to have another baby. Only to discover it was twins yet again! All conceived naturally. A very rare occurrence. But as Ally recalls, “it wasn’t a shock, because I actually thought I was having another set of twins. I said to the radiologist, I just have this feeling… And she said, there’s one heartbeat… and there’s another heartbeat. And I think I was just like ahh, okay - lets go!”

She says of those very early years with four year old twins and newborn twins that “we just functioned… not normally, there’s nothing normal about two sets of twins! But I do remember going from two to four kids instantly. That was huge. Absolutely huge. Exhausting huge. I remember lots of crying. And sleep deprivation. I did a lot of washing at night because I didn’t sleep much back then anyway. I didn’t join a mother’s group because everywhere I went people would make such a big deal. I used to hide that I had two sets of twins. I was very young, only 23 years old, and I didn’t know anyone else in the same position. That was really hard; I didn’t have anyone to relate to or feed off. So all I could really do was treat them as individuals but give them all a similarly strong foundation.”

Ally and her husband separated when the boys were 12 and 16. Ally continued to raise them whilst holding down jobs as a sales rep, a manager of a supermarket and weekend work at King Furniture. She also lifted weights in their garage twice a day and was very fit and healthy. She made sure the boys never missed out on anything. “The only thing they had to do was iron their shirts. Other than that they were off playing sport, doing music, going out and seeing friends.”

Their relatively normal life however came to an end one day when Ally raced down the stairs at home. She was on her way to work and “I went to pick up the kettle as normal, to make a cup of coffee. And then I thought I can’t do it. I just could not pick up the kettle.” She went to the doctor straight away because she knew something was not right. And they put her on antidepressants.

“They thought my mental health was connected to my physical. And that the neurotransmitters weren’t firing enough and my body was shutting down. So I went from somebody who’d never even taken a panadeine tablet to somebody who had hands full of medication. That was the hardest thing to deal with. Everything changes, your personality, your ability to think clearly… everything changed.”

It took a good two years for doctors to diagnose Ally properly with osteoporosis. “By then my bones had become brittle like honeycomb, and what happened was they had been so brittle in certain parts of my spine that they just crumbled and fractured.” She was put on her back for six months of rest and she now has to be very, very careful. You wouldn’t know it because her personality is so lively and upbeat, but Ally lives with chronic pain 24/7. It’s masked only by constant panadeine forte (osteoporosis is normally treated with morphene but she is allergic to it). She has an 86% chance of breaking something if she falls over, and she has constant tests to see how quickly her back or neck is declining in bone density. “Usually it’s 70 year old women who are like this,” says Ally, “and I was only 39 at the time. It’s not genetic. It just happens and you have it for life.”

After years of being wrongly treated with antidepressants and various test drugs, “you slowly come back – but it takes awhile.” Ally was forced to quit her jobs during those years. “I miss work dearly. I haven’t worked since the 14th of May 2012.”

Her boys, being teenagers, weren’t necessarily helpful during that time. “They still thought mum would do everything, but I wasn’t able to do anything. Thank god I had insurance, but that took so long to come through. You keep trying, but it doesn’t work. You become a burden on those around you instead of a blessing. It was awful to suddenly not be able to do what you had always been doing. To see your house and family unraveling around you – that was an eye opener. Because I didn’t know which direction to go in. I’d been divorced nearly four years by then so I didn’t have anyone else to help.”

Since Ally could no longer pay their bills they lost everything. She and her two sets of twins were on the street, literally. As her son says: “I remember sitting on the nature strip together one day with all our furniture. We had lunch looking up at our house, knowing we couldn’t live there anymore.” They spent a few weeks in a motel and in a friend’s house, and then Ally sent her sons to various mate’s places while she slept in the car. It didn’t worry Ally, “at least the boys were cared for and that’s all I worried about,” she says.

After a stint in crisis accommodation they were finally provided with a tiny commission housing flat for the five of them. “I told them I had four boys and they’re in and out. But this is all they gave me. So I thought oh well. So sometimes we have their girlfriends here and their guy friends, and mattresses are all over the floor!”

Ally herself was recovering from a two week virus when I interviewed her, and was grinning up at me from a mattress in the living room. “We live upstairs but I wasn’t complaining. When they said they had a place for us I took it.” Even though she has to hike up the stairs daily with her chronic pain, making sure she treads extremely carefully.

To visit her flat is to stumble out of the dark and dirty stairwell and into another world of warm light and tasteful colours and antiques. It’s fitting that she keeps a beautiful vintage copy of Alice in Wonderland on display in the living room. Because that’s what it feels like – to go from the dreary concrete outside to falling into a beautifully kept home that is Ally’s own wonderland. Or as she says: “some of our old nice things…from another life.”

“We came from a beautiful home and the boys had everything they needed. I worked so hard. And when I fractured my spine, it all went down the spiral.” She apologises that she has not done more with the place. “How are people meant to feel good when you live in a place like this?” she asks me. “When I first walked in here I was shocked.” It’s not just the dirty and graffitied stairwells (I’ve included a photograph from one of them above), but in the flats themselves. “Everything was orange,” says Ally. “There was orange paint everywhere. And I thought oh my god. There were big holes in the wall, and under the sink all the way through to the concrete. And there were rats coming up.”

She went back to the housing commission office and told them matter of factly (“I wasn’t being rude”) but “I think it’s not fair for people to walk in to what you’re proposing. Because we had no other choice. We don’t have anywhere else to go. So therefore we have to take whatever is given to us. Or rather, it’s not given, we have to pay rent for this.”

She set to work, while her boys adjusted to their new surrounds and went out studying, working and going to university or their internships. She painted their new home in small increments whenever they had enough money left over. “I’ll take off all the skirting boards eventually. And I have a lot of artwork so it has to go up. But painting takes a lot of time because it is cement walls. So it takes four coats of paint,” she explains. “They really don’t care what you do in here, so long as you leave them alone.”

I can’t get over the fact that this woman has gone from raising four boys, working 3 jobs and exercising daily to suddenly not being able to do too much at all. “I’m a bit of a recluse now,” she admits. “It’s not that I’m scared of falling, it’s just the boys and work were my life. And my home. So therefore when you can’t go to work or the gym anymore or you don’t have a home you can be proud of or look after, you become quite introverted. Because that’s been your life. And slowly, slowly it all got taken away and then bang. Gone.”

On the brighter side though, Ally says “I’m actually just starting to come a little bit normal. If that’s possible. I’m just starting to sort of find my feet again. It’s been a long four years.”

And when I ask her for advice she would give to any other parents out there who are trying to raise two sets of twins (!) or any range of children really, with very little, she says: “hold them close. Just hold them really close. They grow up fast and it’s not always a nice world. It doesn’t matter if you’re crying while you’re holding them. It doesn’t matter if they’re six hours old or twenty six, you have to hold them close to you because they need it. And make sure they love one another.”

When I close the door to her wonderland I leave with a big smile on my face, having encountered an eighteenth century desk taking up the entirety of their tiny kitchen, “because it’s all that fits”. Her younger son, one of the fraternal twins, leads me courteously back to my car. “I hope that was what you wanted” he asks me anxiously. “Yes,” I tell him, “She is a wonderful person, your mum.” He smiles and agrees and I say to him as I walk away, “you look after her.”

Beautifully expressed, heartfelt and matter of fact words from Alli. No woe is me, taken what life has cast her way and is making the most of it and guiding her boys towards achieving and making the most their lives too!